How long should mining take on the testnet?

Question

I've been following the excellent tutorials by Jordan from Decipher, and am now really keen to publish something to testnet.

I've got a geth node running on an AWS small instance, and it's been mining for around 18 hours and still my balance hasn't gone above 0. I've also tried using faucet here: http://faucet.ropsten.be:3001/, which has returned successfully, but the ETH hasn't arrived in my account.

I think I'm on ropsten, but don't really know how to check

admin says this:

protocols: { 
  eth: { 
    difficulty: 861947972271291, 
    genesis: "0x41941023680923e0fe4d74a34bdac8141f2540e3ae90623718e47d66d1ca4a2d", 
    head: "0x66dbb58f9ed28c35a3725639daf07a6deddd63aa0224cc697e74eb6ae712b371", 
    network: 3 
  } 
}

And my logs say:

INFO [07-09|09:13:56] Imported new chain segment blocks=1 txs=1 mgas=0.021 elapsed=247.402ms mgasps=0.085 number=1267059 hash=61c0e4…d41039
INFO [07-09|09:14:03] Imported new chain segment blocks=1 txs=0 mgas=0.000 elapsed=3.634ms mgasps=0.000 number=1267063 hash=c60743…6d8949
INFO [07-09|09:14:03] Commit new mining work number=1267064 txs=0 uncles=1 elapsed=344.975µs

Any ideas?

Cheers!

Answer 1

I use rinkeby and it usually takes 1 min to mine a transaction , but sometimes it can take hours or days depending upon network congestion.

Answer 2

It may take days, try this link instead, use first button.

Answer 3

Ropsten has a moderate amount of hashpower on it nowadays (a handful of GPU mining rigs), to reduce the risk of attackers taking the network down (again).

You might want to look at using Kovan or Rinkeby instead of Ropsten, since they're more reliable, and have reliable faucets.